A few years ago, the historic arrest of a former US president — especially one as polarizing and bombastic as Donald Trump — would have been a moment made for Twitter. The platform is known as the first place people turn to find and riff on breaking news with witty commentary and unfiltered reactions.
But on Tuesday, the reaction to Trump’s arraignment on the social media platform was a bit of a snoozefest.
“When Trump got Covid in October 2020, folks were glued to Twitter and were hanging onto every moment and the schadenfreude was off the charts,” writer and activist Chip Goines said in a text. Now, Goines said, the reaction was “underwhelming” and “muted.”
There were several factors at play. For one, people care less about Trump than they did when he was president, and the arrest was visually boring and low on drama. Plus, Trump himself wasn’t tweeting. But there’s no denying that Twitter as an app has lost some of its magic as the most happening place to be during a major breaking news moment and that Trump has lost his sheen as the de facto king of social media, with Twitter being his primary platform of choice.
Data from media intelligence firm Zignal Labs shows how discussion of Trump’s arrest paled in comparison to other major news cycles involving the former president. In the 24 hours after each event, people tweeted about Trump almost two times more when he had Covid in 2020, and three and half times more after the January 6 Capitol riot, according to Zignal Labs.
On Tuesday evening, as Trump was addressing his arrest in a speech at Mar-a-Lago, the event didn’t even make the top three Twitter US trending hashtags. (They were about the Barbie movie, the rapper Roddy Rich, and Super Mario.) Only one of the top 10 trending US hashtags was even related to Trump’s arrest — and it wasn’t about Trump but about a comment that CNN commentator Van Jones made when discussing the former president’s arrest.
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